A knowledge management service portal is a vital tool for competitive advantage, providing your organization with the ability to turn information and data into effective action.
The Challenges in Designing an Enterprise Knowledge Portal
Keeping up in a rapidly evolving digital world is difficult for most organizations. Business operations change faster than IT can support and user needs are constantly expanding. While things have improved since the early days of online knowledge integration, it’s still a complex process with many organizations weighed down with legacy technologies that no longer serve their needs.
When weaknesses in organizational strategy, bad data and information, and the failure to consider end-user needs are factored-in, you have a knowledge management problem that can seem overwhelming.
Knowledge Management Portal Benefits for Enterprises
A knowledge management portal acts as the “door” to applications and information employees need to find a solution to a problem or to find experts who can help them. Properly designed, it empowers individual employees with the collective knowledge of the entire organization, making it easy for them to share best practices and other knowledge relevant to your business.
An enterprise knowledge platform also:
- Focuses on maintaining and verifying the validity of the knowledge it provides, produces, and manages
- Distinguishes knowledge from mere data
- Encourages users to produce and integrate knowledge as opposed to mere information
What should you expect from your KMS portal? Accessibility, collaboration, and powerful search capabilities are a good start.
Create a Culture of Sharing
We live in a sharing economy world with people valuing and benefiting from collective, accessible efforts. Siloed information is giving way to a culture of shared knowledge in which users are empowered by the wisdom and also learn from the mistakes of others.
Organizations with a strong knowledge-sharing culture are rewarded with happier and more productive team members who are more engaged with and vested in helping the company achieve its goals. Because it promotes engagement, knowledge sharing shows that you value what your employees have to offer.
Social Networking in Knowledge Management
The best knowledge portal software enables collaboration and communications among users no matter where they are and no matter which device they are using. Many organizations are now adopting a social networking feature in their KMS to capture:
- Tacit knowledge, or wisdom, that’s hyper-specific as to how to deal with a particular client or customer
- Social knowledge that encompasses actions common to all customer interactions
- Individual knowledge that comes from one employee gaining a particular insight after working on a project or dealing with a customer
When you integrate social networking into your KMS, you can increase interactions between employees which, in turn, boosts their trust levels and encourages more effective collaboration.
Robust Search
A powerful KMS offers dynamic search capabilities that significantly reduce the amount of time your employees spend looking for information. When it delivers, every department benefits: salespeople quickly locate marketing content, customer support provides more timely assistance, and new hires can easily access training material as often as needed.
In Summary
KMS portals will continue to evolve. Machine learning, social collaboration integration, and natural language processing will contribute to making knowledge more powerful, fueling a company’s success. Internal intranet portals and cloud-based solutions will help teams explore and better understand the company’s vision and goals.
Through it all, the mission of an effective KMS will remain the same: to enable people to make better decisions, take more efficient actions, and deliver improved results in support of your organization’s overall business strategy. That it also provides a more meaningful workspace for your employees is a serendipitous bonus.
